I don't understand why people keep saying they've "removed" the escape key. The thing is programmable. http://live.arstechnica.com/hello-again-apples-october-2016-...

Do you remember texting without a touchscreen?

I used to do it without looking at my phone, now with touchscreen I lost that ability, I have to check every word, some keyboards help with that correcting my words if I moved my fingers a little to the side, but it's not the same, with physical buttons I was sure I pressed the correct buttons. Physical buttons give touch feedback and that's important when you're focused on something important in your screen. I don't want to switch my focus from my screen to my keyboard every time I need to use a function key.

Interesting.

I almost always text on my phone without looking because the visual effect where the selected letter appears above your finger actually makes me slow down. I was never able to use physical phone keyboards as easily as the adaptive software ones on modern phones.

Also I use vi mostly so I only use function keys rarely, in which case I look up.

Which phones did you use? I used Palm Treos from 2004 to about 2009 or so, some of the keys even had a bump so you could locate the home row keys. You truly could type somewhat accurately without looking at the keyboard.

edit: wrong year

> I don't understand why people keep saying they've "removed" the escape key.

Because programmers are at least as fond of hyperbole as the reality television programming they all claim to hate.

The controversy creates discussions and clicks.

If it's anything like their existing dynamic stuff, I worry it will be too slow. There are far too many cases where I search for something, see it pop up, go to hit enter, and as I'm hitting enter, Spotlight decides to shift focus to something else. So for their magic toolbar thing to work, they'd have to do something they haven't been able to do in my experience.

That's fair. My experience has been, at least with the iPhone, that they've made an effort to make it more and more responsive as time has gone on. Tangentially, this is why I don't understand people who install these third party keyboards that make background network requests. It's like, the keyboard is slow enough as it is without having to go to the public internet on a cell connection :/

Yeah, I haven't noticed that yet. Not to say it hasn't improved, but I just haven't noticed an improvement. My other concern is workflow. Right now, the magic toolbar is only on the laptop. This basically means the magic toolbar is only useful when using my laptop's keyboard. Otherwise, it's really an awkward tool to use.

I'm 99% sure the escape key will be there when in Terminal.app, I also imagine terminals like iTerm2 will have some really sweet TouchBar options to make it even better with all your console apps.

Apple may prove me wrong with the ergonomics of the TouchBar, but I've yet to find a virtual button that I've liked as much as a physical button.

The feel of a real button is great, but you can imagine the possibilities of what you can do with that space when you look at your MacBook keyboard right now and notice you likely never use a thing but the escape key, brightness and volume.

I haven't used it yet, so I can't judge it too much, but I imagine Escape actually works well since it's the top corner of the keyboard and easy to feel, if escape were anywhere else it would really suck.

The only F key I don't use regularly is f6. (Though f2 is mainly a Windows thing... I doubt I use it much in OS X.)

I've got a keyboard with clicky button-type Esc and F keys, which might be a fair approximation to the new F key strip. (Pressing them isn't a million miles away from clicking on the Force Touch trackpad.)

It's bearable, but not really very nice.

Yeah because you can usually find it without looking!

> I'm 99% sure the escape key will be there when in Terminal.app

Confirmed correct:

http://live.arstechnica.com/hello-again-apples-october-2016-...

I mean it's still there, it's just not a physical key right?

And you can use ctrl [ instead which is closer to the home row anyway.

If you can't rebind keys, Ctrl [ is THE most ergonomic way to use VIM. I really don't understand why you would use the real Esc key. It's too far away to be useful.

It is, which means this whole thing is a tempest in a teapot which will look phenomenally dumb in 3 months.

Wouldn't it be even nicer if you had an Insert/Cmd mode key instead, which showed which mode you were currently in and let you toggle?

The nice thing is with this touch bar thingy that's possible.

> The nice thing is with this touch bar thingy that's possible.

As long as it's supported by the program, of course.

What if you wanted to use mc (The Midnight Commander), which relies heavily on F keys? wait for the update?

Most frequently used keys? I would agree that in Windows using the Esc key is common, but in OS X really isn't.

If on some box where you cant setup vim like you want, CTRL[ works as escape and CTRL[[ when in command-line mode.

The answer is simple. Apple doesn't think you should use VIM. You need to move on to more modern methods of programming.

"Modernize your methods!" says Robert DeNiro, an actor who's been phoning it in since the late 90s.

I'll give you the same answer I'll give Apple: don't tell me how to be productive. I have already found vim key bindings to improve my development experience by almost an order of magnitude. You're not taking that away from me.

Nobody is doing either. You're being paranoid.